Advance Health Care Directive

01/25/2019

If you don’t have documents that protect you, your family and your assets, you should consider doing yourself a favor and putting them on your list to accomplish in 2019, according to Fox Business in “3 financial documents everyone needs”

A Will. The essential function of a will is to ensure that your wishes are carried out, when you are no longer alive. It’s not just for rich people. Everyone should have a will. It can include everything from your financial assets to life insurance, family heirlooms, artwork and any real estate property.

A will can also be used to protect your business, provide for charities and ensure lifelong care for your pets.

If you have children, a will is especially important. Your will is used to name a guardian for your minor children. Otherwise, the state will decide who should rear your children.

Your will is also used to name your executor. That is the person who has the legal responsibility for making sure your financial obligations are honored. Without an executor, the state will appoint a person to handle those tasks.

An Advanced Medical Directive. What would happen if you became ill or injured and could not make medical decisions for yourself? An advanced medical directive and health care proxy are the documents you need to assign the people you want to make decisions on your behalf. The advanced medical directive, also called a living will, explains your wishes for care. The healthcare proxy appoints a person to make healthcare decisions for you. As long as you have legal capacity, these documents aren’t used, but once they are needed, you and your family will be glad they are in place.

A Durable Power of Attorney. This document is used to name someone who will make financial decisions, if you are not able to do so. Be careful to name a person you trust implicitly to make good decisions on your behalf. That may be a family member, an adult child or an attorney.

Once you’ve had these documents prepared as part of your estate plan, you’re not done. These documents need to be reviewed and updated every now and then. Life changes, laws change, and what was a great tax strategy at one point may not be effective, if there’s a change to the law. Your estate planning attorney will help create and update your estate plan.

Given the happy fact that you should expect to live a long time, what can you do to protect yourself and your family? Here are four steps:

Have a plan for long-term plan. For a married couple, it’s likely that one of the two will end up in a nursing home. Plan for how you’ll manage to pay for that, long before you’ll need it. If you can purchase a long-term care insurance policy, while you are still healthy enough to qualify, you won’t need to use up all the household’s money to pay for the care. Long-term care insurance usually pays for both skilled nursing home care and in-home health care aides.

Traditional long-term care policies can be expensive. However, insurance companies have created hybrid policies that combine long-term care benefits with life insurance. If you don’t use the long-term benefits, your loved ones receive the life insurance proceeds upon your death. That takes a way the worry that you will pay premiums and get nothing back.

Plan for incapacity. You’ll need to have a medical advance directive, including a health care proxy and health care powers of attorney, so you can name another person to make your decisions when you are no longer able to do so. Do not assume that because you are married, your spouse will be legally able to make those decisions.

If you become incompetent and don’t have a medical advance directive in place, your family will need to go to court to get legal authority to make those decisions. This is a guardianship proceeding, which is expensive, time-consuming and stressful.

The same holds true for financial decisions. You’ll want a power of attorney, so someone else can sign on your behalf and access your accounts. This should be a trusted individual who will look out for you and your family.

If you die and assets are solely in your name, your family will need to go to court before they can access any of your assets. This is a process known as probate. If you have an estate plan in place, your plan should include having some accounts that are POD or Payable on Death, so your loved ones are not left without assets. Your estate planning attorney will recommend the right planning tools, so that your family is protected.

Finally, do your tax planning as part of your estate plan. You likely won’t be paying federal estate tax. However, there is a good chance that your state has an estate tax or an inheritance tax.

Campbell, who recently passed away, left two wills from 2001 and 2006. The 2006 will names Campbell’s fourth wife Kimberly, who is the executor of the estate, and five of Campbell’s other children as his beneficiaries. Campbell went public with his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2011. However, it’s not known how far back his illness began. The legal burden facing his children: prove that he lacked the needed capacity to execute both wills.

If the will is deemed invalid because of lack of capacity or undue influence, the immediately preceding will is resurrected, said one estate planning attorney who is not affiliated with the case. The previous will probably disinherited them also, which is why they must prove the invalidity of both wills.

Kimberly has told a local newspaper that she would not challenge the kid’s right to contest the wills and the judge’s decision noted the lack of opposition. She has also filed a claim seeking reimbursement from the estate for more than $500,000 to cover the cost of his medical care.

It was also reported that one of his daughters, Debbie Campbell-Cloyd, has filed for a complete accounting of all payments made by the estate, as well as payments to and from a previously undisclosed bank account. She alleges that royalties that should have been deposited into an account controlled by Campbell’s estate, were instead deposited into this account, which is now controlled by Kimberly. The singer’s former manager has power of attorney over the account.

An estate planning attorney can advise you in creating an estate plan that fits your unique circumstances and may include a blended family.

08/24/2018

There are tools in an estate plan that a college student may need and are also beneficial to you.

If your child is heading off to college you have prepared them already with background education and the ability to live away from home. However, are they prepared with the documents that an adult needs? They should be, according to the Monterey Herald in “Liza Horvath, Senior Advocate: Off to College.”

When college students go to off to a world of dorm living, classes and increased independence, many are on their own for the first time. If they are 18 or older, they are legally considered adults. If they become sick or injured while away, the rules of HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, prohibit anyone from speaking with a doctor, gaining access to medical records or being informed of their status–even their own parents!

If your college admissions package did not include an Advance Health Care Directive and a HIPAA release form giving you permission to speak on behalf of your student, speak to doctors and to be part of any medical decisions. Your estate planning attorney will be able to draft those documents for you.

Make sure that your college-bound student also has a list of who they should contact in an emergency, including cell, home and work numbers and email addresses. This list should include their primary treating physician and a history of their immunizations, chronic conditions, medications and other relevant medical issues.

This information can be stored in the cloud or on their phones. However, if the phone is stolen or lost, so is a lot of sensitive data. Write it down on an old-fashioned piece of paper and keep a hard copy at home and one on your own computer, so it can be easily sent if necessary.

You should also consider having a power of attorney for finances and a directive to the college, so information on your student can be released to you. This will allow you to see the academic records and act on your child’s behalf on any legal matters.

If you have adult children, even those who graduated long ago, you may also to wish to have some of these documents prepared.